And Then What? The Crisis After the Crisis
Why Leaders Who Solve the First Problem Often Create the Next One
Dan Heath opens his book Upstream with a parable.
Two friends are walking along a river when they spot a child drowning. They dive in, pull the child to shore, and begin CPR. Before they can catch their breath, another child floats past. They drag her out too. Then another child appears. And another.
As one friend keeps wading in, pulling children from the current, the other turns and starts walking briskly upstream.
“Where are you going?” the first friend shouts.
“I’m going to find out who’s throwing kids in the river.”
It’s a joke, of a kind. But it is also one of the most precise descriptions of leadership failure available — the tendency to become so expert at managing consequences that we never pause to question the conditions producing them. We get very good at the rescue. We never think to address the problem at the source. And part of the reason we fail to do that is because we don’t think about what comes after the action we take. This is what is called second-order thinking — not just “if I do x, y happens,” but deeper; if I do x, y happens, but then z might follow, in which case a might occur, and so forth.
Now apply this to the world as it stands in April 2026.
The Strait of Hormuz — twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest, carrying roughly 20% of the world’s petroleum supply every day — effectively closed in early March. Most headlines told the same story: oil prices spiking, gasoline expensive. Brent crude past $100 a barrel. Californians paying over $5 at the pump.
That was the obvious story. The visible child in the water.
What nobody was talking about loudly enough was the cascades already forming downstream. The fertilizer that couldn’t move. The crops that wouldn’t grow. The grocery prices that will rise six months later. The families who would eventually brave hazardous crossings — not because they chose to leave, but because staying had become impossible. The governments that might not survive the winter.
Most conscientious leaders wade in to rescue after the fact. But the best ones, the stewards for the next generation, are already thinking downstream and acting beforehand.
There Is a Name for This
The Hormuz crisis is not just an energy crisis, a food crisis, or a geopolitical crisis. It is a problem blindness crisis — the term Heath uses for our collective failure to see what’s coming even when the signals are entirely visible.
Heath identifies three forces that conspire to keep leaders from thinking both upstream and downstream.
Problem blindness: we simply don’t see the problem forming.
A lack of ownership: nobody’s job description requires them to trace the connection between a closed shipping lane and a food riot eighteen months later.
Tunnelling: when leaders are managing an immediate crisis, the scarcity of time and attention actively crowds out the bigger, slower-moving consequences that will eventually prove more damaging than the original shock.
The Hormuz cascade is a masterclass in all three.
How One Chokepoint Becomes a World Crisis
The energy shock arrives first — visible within hours. Brent crude sharply higher, US gasoline rising into the $3.20–$4.00 range, jet fuel spiking first in Asia. This is the wave that’s making the front page.
Then the agriculture story surfaces — and most people miss it. The Strait is not just an oil route. Roughly one-third of all globally traded fertilizer travels through it, including as much as two-thirds of worldwide seaborne urea. Within three weeks of the closure, urea prices had risen more than 28%. At the New Orleans import hub, urea jumped from $516 to $683 per metric ton in a single week. Fifty-four US agricultural groups wrote to President Trump as planting season began: “The closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent fuel and fertilizer prices skyrocketing.” The question is no longer whether input costs would rise. It is whether farmers would simply plant less.
Crop yields follow fertilizer — not immediately, but inevitably. When fertilizer becomes unaffordable, farmers ration or leave acreage fallow. The result, months later, is lower output of corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. Brazil imports nearly half its fertilizer through the Strait. African nations reliant on imported grain face the sharpest impacts. The numbers don’t lie: even a modest yield reduction triggers meaningful food inflation. The OECD-FAO estimates that a single year of synthetic-fertilizer disruption could push the global food price index up by 6% by 2028. For low-income countries, that shock isn’t theoretical — food inflation has already peaked at 30%, and double-digit price spikes have become the norm during supply disruptions.
Food inflation destabilizes economies and governments. Higher energy and food costs erode purchasing power faster than almost any other force. Stock markets price in the direct effects quickly — shares of energy companies up, airlines and consumer staples hammered — but the more dangerous effect builds slowly. Higher cost of living compresses corporate earnings; rising unemployment weakens demand further; central banks face the stagflation dilemma of raising rates into a slowing economy. The feedback loop tightens.
Then comes the wave that will define geopolitics: displacement and migration. When people cannot feed their families, when institutions cannot protect them, when staying is more dangerous than leaving — they move. They move toward stability, which in the current landscape means Europe and North America. The countries most exposed to fertilizer shortages are precisely those with the least fiscal resilience and the most existing political fragility. Some countries will not survive the combination of shocks in their current form. And when they don’t, their citizens will arrive at borders already the subject of fierce political debate.
The migration debate will intensify. The political pressure will escalate. And the extraordinary irony will be this: the very political actors who are angriest about rising migration will, in many cases, be the same ones who supported or failed to question the actions that made it inevitable.
The Libya Trap: Debating Downstream While Creating the Problem Upstream
This is not a hypothetical pattern. We have watched it play out with painful clarity.
The bombing campaigns in Libya, Syria, and Iraq — each justified on its own first-order terms — shattered the institutional frameworks that had contained global migration patterns. Libya’s collapse following the 2011 NATO intervention eliminated the state structures that served as a de facto migration buffer between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Syria’s civil war, inflamed by external intervention from multiple directions, produced the largest refugee crisis Europe had seen since World War II. The 2003 Iraq invasion generated millions of displaced people and catalyzed the regional instability that continues to produce refugee flows today.
In each case, the first-order logic was debated — sometimes vigorously, often not. But the downstream consequences were rarely modelled with anything approaching the rigor they deserved. What happens to the state when you remove the regime? Who fills the vacuum? Where do the populations go? Why would we expect these populations to act differently than we would under the same circumstances?
And then, when the consequences arrived, political discourse did not return upstream to question the decisions that produced them. It stayed firmly, almost aggressively, downstream. Border policy. Deportation numbers. Migration caps. Integration failures. The full weight of democratic debate was brought to bear on managing the consequences of decisions that were never adequately challenged when they were being made. Worse, previous decisions and their consequences were never factored in when the next similar decision was faced.
Heath calls the downstream zone the “zone of response” — and observes that while it is always optional to work upstream, it is never optional to respond to the problem once it arrives. The boats appear. The camps fill. The political crisis erupts. And everyone is suddenly very busy, none of them asking: why, exactly, are we here?
This is not a case for or against any particular intervention. It is a case for second-order thinking — for the insistence that any consequential decision be accompanied by a disciplined analysis of what is likely to follow, several steps out. And for the intellectual honesty to acknowledge when a downstream problem is, in material part, a consequence of upstream choices.
The Boardroom Version of the Same Mistake
Corporate history tells the same story, wearing different clothes.
Boeing and the 737 MAX. The logic of upgrading the existing 737 platform rather than developing a clean-sheet aircraft was commercially rational. The downstream consequences: the MCAS flight control system installed to compensate for aerodynamic changes, without adequate pilot training requirements, two fatal crashes, 346 deaths, the longest grounding of a commercial aircraft in aviation history, and over $20 billion in estimated losses. The cost-cutting decision that seemed rational in isolation looked very different when the full cascade was traced.
Kodak’s Digital Inversion. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and suppressed it to protect the film business — financially logical by the metrics of the day. The downstream consequence was a decade-long window during which competitors built digital competency while Kodak defended a declining margin. The consequence after that: bankruptcy in 2012, despite having invented the technology that disrupted it. Protecting the present can often destroy the future.
In each case, the decision made sense given first-order analysis. The catastrophe lived in the cascade. And in each case, after the consequences arrived, the discourse focused on managing them rather than on the upstream decisions that had made them inevitable.
How to Think in Cascades
The Hormuz crisis is being experienced, in most boardrooms, as an energy story. It is, in reality, a cascade story — one playing out across fertilizer markets, crop yields, food inflation, sovereign debt, political fragility, and eventually mass displacement, arriving at borders as a migration crisis that will be debated with passion and confusion, as though it emerged from nowhere.
Dan Heath would recognize the pattern immediately. Leaders expertly managing downstream consequences of upstream decisions never adequately challenge and analyze them. The same dynamic produced the migration pressures that followed interventions in Libya and Iraq. The same pattern brought down Kodak, trapped Boeing, and made the Treaty of Versailles a blueprint for the next war instead of the end of the last one. The first-order logic was coherent each time. The catastrophe lived in the cascade.
When facing any significant decision, work through three questions — and resist the temptation to stop at the first answer.
Ask “And then what?” — at least twice. The first answer is usually visible and already priced in. The oil price spike was obvious within hours. The migration event is eighteen months away. Both are part of the same causal chain.
Ask “Who else moves?” Every decision changes the incentive structure for other actors — governments, competitors, populations, adversaries, even your team. Model their response, not just your own action. Wells Fargo’s sales targets didn’t just pressure staff; they quietly rewrote what “success” meant on the front line. Leadership created the conditions, then stopped watching. By the time the fraudulent accounts surfaced, millions of customers had been affected and the reputational damage was irreversible.
Ask “What makes this fragile?” Downstream consequences rarely create new vulnerabilities — they expose existing ones invisible under normal conditions. The Hormuz closure didn’t create agricultural fragility in Brazil or political fragility in the Sahel. It revealed it. The best time to see the fragility is before the stress test arrives.
And perhaps most importantly: when the debate will be loudest downstream, ask questions loudest upstream. The noise of the crisis is not a signal that the crisis is the right level of analysis. It is usually a signal that the real question has not yet been asked.
For leaders and advisors, this is the edge. It is not managing the downstream faster or better than everyone else — while laudable, anyone can wade in and pull children from the river. The distinctive value is being the person willing to walk upstream and ask who is doing the throwing, before the next child appears.
“The measure of a leader is not how well they manage the crisis everyone sees. It’s how much of it they saw coming — and how far upstream and downstream they were willing to look.”
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If this was useful, forward it to someone carrying a decision they haven’t named yet.
The outer work of leadership — how we decide — has a counterpart. If you’re also asking what it’s all for, I explore that separately in my free Substack newsletter: thegoodhumanpractice.com
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